Wednesday, December 16, 2015

BBG | Andrew Lack is the Chief Executive Officer and Director of the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

Prior to being selected by the BBG, Lack served as the Chairman of the
Bloomberg Media Group. He joined Bloomberg in October 2008 as CEO of
its Global Media Group and was responsible for expanding television,
radio, magazine, conference and digital businesses.

Previous to joining Bloomberg, Lack was Chairman and CEO of Sony Music
Entertainment, where he led the company’s roster of prominent
international artists and vast catalog of recorded music from around
the world. Before joining Sony Music Entertainment, he was president
and chief operating officer of NBC, where he oversaw entertainment,
news (including MSNBC and CNBC), NBC stations, sales and broadcast and
network operations. He was responsible for expanding the Today show to
three hours and creating the show’s street-side studio in New York’s
Rockefeller Center.

From 1993 to 2001, Lack was president of NBC News, which he transformed
into America’s most-watched news organization through NBC Nightly News,
Meet the Press, Today and Dateline NBC.

While the cable-news network’s daytime schedule has largely been
reworked since February, there are likely more changes to come, said
Andrew Lack, the veteran TV-news executive who rejoined the company in
April to supervise both NBC News and MSNBC.

“It’s just the beginning. We are early days. These were important
steps, the first few steps, but there is a lot more we are thinking
about. It’s a long game, as I have said, and we are just at the
beginning of it,” he said in an interview about MSNBC last week. “We
have got a lot of parts and pieces we have got to fit into this puzzle.”

His remarks indicate the final form for MSNBC, devoted over the past
few years to presenting the news through a progressive lens, has yet to
be achieved. MSNBC’s ratings have dropped significantly over the past
two years as it veered away from coverage of breaking news. The
network’s viewership losses have outpaced those of the collective
cable-news juggernaut: While the total median viewership for Fox News
Channel, CNN and MSNBC over a 24-hour period fell 7% in 2014, according
to Pew Research Center analysis of Nielsen data, MSNBC’s tumbled 14%.

Change at the network in recent weeks has been swift and definite.
Already, regular hosts like Ed Schultz and Reverend Al Sharpton have
been moved off the weekday daytime grid. Fist tap Rohan.